


to memory now recalled

by seraphcelene



Category: The Walking Dead (TV)
Genre: Episode: s04e08 Too Far Gone, Gen, Missing Scene
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-13
Updated: 2016-06-13
Packaged: 2018-07-14 19:08:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 688
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7186505
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/seraphcelene/pseuds/seraphcelene
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"anyone or everyone, those who are dead are not dead, they're just living in my head and since I fell for that spell, I am living there as well"</p>
            </blockquote>





	to memory now recalled

**Author's Note:**

> post-4.8 Too Far Gone. for xx_pinkstar as part of the MAKE A WISH! multi-fandom wish fulfillment ficathon. The prompt from 42 by Coldplay doubles as the summary.

"Come on, sweetie. Come say hello to your little sister." Lori's hand is outstretched, motioning him forward. "It's okay," she says, and he believes it because what else can he do.

Rick stands beside her, smiling like he's never seen anything sweeter in his life than his wife and his new baby girl. Then Carl steps forward, eyes on Lori and the baby. A baby girl, his little sister. She's small. A little peanut. Light as air. Little Ass Kicker, and he doesn't know why he knows that.

She's laughing, sweet and bright. There's a rattling at the edge of his thoughts, a dry, husky sound like air through broken pipes, but the baby is laughing and his mom is smiling and reaching. Just like he remembers. Just like he thinks it all happened or should have happened, but there's that sound scratching at the furthest edge of his thoughts. Something he ought to recall.

Carl frowns, looks behind his mother and his father, looks into the shadowed trees and sees nothing. The sun is too far overhead and it blocks out everything. Shadows straight up and down except at the edge of the woods and it's like another country over there. Carl reaches for the gun at his hip. Hand over the holster, unsnapping the leather strap over the gun's butt like he's seen his dad do maybe a million times. And he can't remember why he remembers that, either.

If it wasn't for the hat, his father's hat shading his eyes, Carl wouldn't be able to see anything at all.

And he looks down and he's further from the ground than he used to be. Longer, taller, and his shadow looks like a stripe of boy stretched across the grass. Carl smiles and points. "Hey, mom," he says and she'll exclaim over how much he's grown, how tall he's gotten, and how long his hair is. Her hand brushing across his forehead, pushing back the hair hanging in his face and she'll say: "Looks like you need a haircut."

But when Carl looks up his gaze is caught, arrested by the pool of blood collecting at her feet. His smile is a dying star, bright and blinding then winking out.

Blood covers his mother's boots and the impossibly thin legs of her jeans. His gaze moves up over the obscenely bloated mound of her belly. That huge belly in the middle of her skinny body. Judith rests on the top curve. Sweet as pie. He can hear her laughing from where he stands. Below, beneath the baby, Lori is dripping blood all over the ground.

It isn't the dream that wakes him: Judith and Lori, Rick. Judith's baby fingers wrapped around Lori's thumb. It's her laughter. Sweet and high as a song, sweet as Beth singing joy and good night, then thinning out and going deep. Air through broken pipes, pushed up from empty lungs. A garble like love and the sound of his name. Shrill and piercing. Hungry. Lonely.

"Judith."

When he jolts awake, baby cries in his ears, for a moment Carl isn't sure where he is. Laying on hard packed Earth, the sky full of stars overhead, and something in the woods, a fox or maybe a cat crying out so that all he can dream of is Judith. Memories race back: blood and fire, Herschel, an abandoned car seat covered in blood.

Rick watches him with knowing, fever-bright eyes. Like they've shared the same nightmare.

Carl turns his head away. Names the sounds in the woods: wild pig, coyote, barn owl. In the day, he names the trees and flowers. Catalogs in his mind all the things that he will need to show Judith. How to tie knots and shoelaces, how to clear a room, and the best angle at which to drive a crowbar through an eye socket. He can not describe the warm, quiet, settling feeling of his mother's hand through his hair. Her arms wrapped around his shoulders, her chin pressed into the crown of his head. Ghost weight. A tangle of memories. He does not have the words.


End file.
